he tearfully admits using a taser on michael fanone. he said he did it for his president. he s the commander in chief and the leader of our country, and he s calling for help. i thought he was calling for help. i thought he was i thought we were doing the right thing. he felt they stole the election, stole this country. it s gone. it s wiped out. america is over. it s destroyed now. joining me now cnn chief legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, jeffrey toobin. judge amy berman jackson said there may be others more accountable. that s what she says to the lower wrung people at the insurrection. what s the significance of that? well, she is someone who has followed the trump saga more closely than any federal judge in the country. she was the paul manafort judge. she was very involved in cases
why haven t they thrown the book at him and others? it is a crime almost never charged in american history. it is legally very murky. the justice department has plenty of crimes that they are able to charge the rioters with, and the immediate the people immediately involved in the events at the capitol. we ll see if there are more exotic charges down the line. but there is no reason for the justice department to get into legal fights with lower level people when they have very conventional crimes they can charge. just to put a bow on this part of our discussion, if you re donald trump, steve bannon or someone in his immediately circle, are you more worried because of what judge jackson said? probably a little. she has an intimate familiarity with the facts of the january 6th case. ultimately, remember, in our system, the decision of whom to investigate and whom to charge belongs to the justice
reflexively, repeatedly lied all the time. it s a tradition of a former kgb agent, vladimir putin maintained. secretary blinken meeting with lavrov. ukraine president says russia is backing a planned coup. but we do believe that the past can be prologue. that s why it is important to take are issue that denials with a pound of salt. because back in 2014, we heard a similar litany of denials that some believed before waking up and seeing russia had gotten away with it. it was executed in real life rather than on social media. here s how it happened. back in february 2014, ukraine s pro-russian president a long-time client of soon to be trump campaign manager paul man manafort, fled the countrywide
na originate from? depositions released as part of the mueller inquiry these came from konstantin kilimnick. supporting the trump presidency because he seems to be okay at looking the other way at the real corruption that exists in ukraine. it would have been a personal benefit for kelimnick and m manafort. it seems to have taken a seed in the president s mind in 2016 and grown since then. it was the first thing he mentioned to zelensky when asking for him to do him a favor. kilimnick, paul man manafort associate, manafort was trump s manager. do you think in some way that russian disinformation is behind
and his associate were working for the old corrupt ukraine crayon dictator. part of what happens is manafort is essentially outed and trump is enraged by that. i think that s where the original animous against ukraine comes from. then he heard this conspiracy theory which was not the russians but the ukrainians who are to blame for interfering in the 2016 election and not to help him but actually to hurt him. uh-huh. he buy this is to the extent, as you say, is his number one ask to the ukrainian president. when you lay it out that way, it s clear. these statements that trump has been making have gone back and preceded even manafort being fired as campaign manager. during the summer of 2016, he was calling into question ukraine s territorial sovereignty and said maybe